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Options to migrate data from MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore

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This document describes the various options to lift and shift your MongoDB workloads to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore offering.

Premigration assessment

Assessment involves finding out whether you're using the features and syntax that are supported. The aim of this stage is to create a list of incompatibilities and warnings, if any. After you have the assessment results, you can try to address the findings during rest of the migration planning.

The Azure Cosmos DB Migration for MongoDB extension in Azure Data Studio helps you assess a MongoDB workload for migrating to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB. You can use this extension to run an end-to-end assessment on your workload and find out the actions that you may need to take to seamlessly migrate your workloads on Azure Cosmos DB. During the assessment of a MongoDB endpoint, the extension reports all the discovered resources.

Tip

We recommend you to go through the supported features and syntax in detail, as well as perform a proof-of-concept prior to the actual migration.

Native MongoDB tools (Offline)

You can use the native MongoDB tools such as mongodump/mongorestore, mongoexport/mongoimport to migrate datasets offline (without replicating live changes) to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore offering.

Scenario MongoDB native tool
Move subset of database data (JSON/CSV-based) mongoexport/mongoimport
Move whole database (BSON-based) mongodump/mongorestore
  • mongoexport/mongoimport is the best pair of migration tools for migrating a subset of your MongoDB database.
    • mongoexport exports your existing data to a human-readable JSON or CSV file. mongoexport takes an argument specifying the subset of your existing data to export.
    • mongoimport opens a JSON or CSV file and inserts the content into the target database instance (Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore in this case.).
    • JSON and CSV aren't a compact format; you may incur excess network charges as mongoimport sends data to Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.
  • mongodump/mongorestore is the best pair of migration tools for migrating your entire MongoDB database. The compact BSON format makes more efficient use of network resources as the data is inserted into Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.
    • mongodump exports your existing data as a BSON file.
    • mongorestore imports your BSON file dump into Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.

Note

The MongoDB native tools can move data only as fast as the host hardware allows.

Data migration using Azure Databricks (Offline/Online)

Next steps